Hermit in the City-Interview with Michael Landy大隱於市-專訪藝術家邁克爾·蘭迪

Michael Landy (born 1963, London) studied at Goldsmiths and is one of the so-called YBA (Young British Artists) generation, who took part in the first great artist-led warehouse exhibition, Freeze, alongside Damien Hirst, in 1988. He really made his name, however, in February 2001, when he systematically catalogued and destroyed all 7,227 of his personal belongings during a two-week long “performance” in a disused department store on Oxford Street, called Break Down. More recently, Acts of Kindness on the London Underground documented, as its titles suggests, kindly interactions between commuters and users of the transport system. Nowadays, Landy is, as he puts it, albeit very tongue in cheek, “all grown up”, having been elected not only as a Royal Academician, but also made Professor of Drawing at the Academy Schools. “Actually,” he laughs, “I’m just trying to find a way I can get thrown out of there, really. That’s what I’m thinking about at the moment.”

In October 2013, Landy moved in to a new studio in trendy Shoreditch. Just around the corner from Spitalfields fruit and vegetable market, the building is one of a whole line that used to be used as warehouse storage space. “You could actually walk between all of the buildings,” Landy explains, “but, at some point, someone decided to turn them into homes.” When he and his partner, fellow artist Gillian Wearing, bought the space, they had it gutted and built on a new top floor in which they now live. Landy describes it as a “live-work space”, although the studio remains very much just that, and is separate from their private quarters.

For an artist, who, in his student years used to squat in vacated buildings in South East London, having such a pristine studio space, as well as a second studio, which he mainly uses from drawing, in arts hub Vyner Street, Bethnal Green, must be quite a new experience. “When I left art college in the 1980s, the art world was a very different place from how it is today,” Landy says. “I went to college in South East London. You could find vacated buildings there, you could squat, you could find subsidised housing very cheaply. We used to literally bring the electricity in off the street. We’d get a kango and rig it up ourselves. That’s how we began – it was much more of a cooperative. It’s much more difficult now for young people, in a different way from how it was with us. For us, we had to deal with the British indifference towards the visual arts. But obviously now that’s all changed. I’d like to think that it was because of us.”

Indeed, the YBAs are responsible for a seismic shift in art consumption – and, as a knock on effect, no doubt, art production. “I remember, when we were at college, we were actually very naïve,” Landy continues. “We didn’t know how to promote ourselves. But then you see the generations that come after you become more and more knowledgeable. We just kind of made it up as we went along. There was no master plan or anything. Nowadays it’s all about the commodification of art. Galleries are getting bigger spaces and then artists have to fill those spaces, so obviously the whole production thing has to get to a whole new level as well.”